CALAVERAS
Calaveras (skulls), is the name of a county in the central part of the Sierra Nevada, on the eastern border. This county is famous for its gold and copper mines, and its Giant Sequoias. The river, to which the name of Calaveras was first given, rises in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada and flows southwest, emptying into the San Joaquín about fifteen miles below Stockton.
The river received its rather lugubrious name at the hands of Captain Moraga, who led the first expedition up the Sacramento and San Joaquín rivers. In his diary, Moraga says that the river tribes fought against those of the Sierra for possession of the salmon in the stream, and that in one battle as many as three thousand were said to have been killed and left on the field. A great number of skulls, relics of this bloody conflict, were found by Moraga scattered along the creek bed, and caused him to give it the name of Las Calaveras. We find in Fremont a corroborating reference to the salmon as a cause of dissension among the Indians of that region: “This fish had a large share in supporting the Indians, who raised nothing, but lived on what nature gave. A ‘salmon water,’ as they named it, was a valuable possession to a tribe or village, and jealously preserved as an inheritance.”
SHORE OF LAKE TAHOE.
“ ... pearl among all lakes.”
Particular interest was aroused in the Indian relics of this county some years ago by the finding of the celebrated “Calaveras skull,” purporting to have been taken from the Tertiary deposit, a stratum in which no human remains had ever before been discovered. A close examination into the circumstances, however, caused scientists to look with great doubt upon the assertion that the skull had been taken from the Tertiary deposit. In the Handbook of American Indians, published by the Smithsonian Institute, the following reference appears: “Remains of aborigines are plentiful in this county, embedded in ancient river gravels, from which gold was washed. By some scientists these remains were thought to belong to the Tertiary Age, but their resemblance to the modern Indian makes this doubtful. The Calaveras skull, still preserved in the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, at Cambridge, Massachusetts, was said to have come from the gravels of Bald Mountain, at a depth of 130 feet, but there are good reasons for suspecting that it was derived from one of the limestone caves so numerous in that region.”